Sideswiped by Glamour

By Marguerite Quantaine

Oct. 24, 2017

Dear Diary:

I was a cast member at La MaMa Theater in 1967 when our director, Walter Leyden Brown, asked us to help remove the seats from the Second Avenue address where we had been performing and bring them to newly leased space on East Fourth Street, where they were to be reinstalled.

The work left me filthy and eager to catch the subway uptown to my apartment on 85th Street. While I was standing in a rush-hour crowd at a street corner waiting to cross the intersection, I noticed a limousine with a swarm of people cater-corner from me.

I turned my head to the right to see whether the woman next to me had noticed the commotion. I was so stunned by her beauty that I could barely mumble to the man on my left, “That’s Elizabeth Taylor next to me.”